Over the last several months, I’ve talked to Manny Yekutiel’s first accuser, Brad Chapin, and others who know Yekutiel to get a sense of why and how the cafe owner and District 8 supervisor candidate found himself at the center of a whisper network around alleged sexual assault. Four other people who work in San Francisco politics told me about other alleged victims, behaviors, and cover-ups beyond Chapin — information that sounded credible in detail and circumstance but was difficult to put on record.
Now, thanks to new reporting by the San Francisco Standard, we know there are two more individuals who allege that an intoxicated Yekutiel groped and assaulted them, even after clearly being told to stop. In turn, Yekutiel dropped out of the race this afternoon, closing the book on his campaign, if not the controversy.
Ryan Clark and his partner, along with Chapin, have shown immense courage in coming forward to hold accountable one of the city’s most visible and popular would-be politicos. Since 2020, Yekutiel has tried to wedge himself into every corner of San Francisco politics, co-founding the nonprofit Civic Joy Fund with now-Mayor Daniel Lurie, getting chummy with billionaire friends like Michael Moritz, and transforming his coffee shop Manny’s into a salon for political discourse. He remained a major frontrunner of the District 8 supervisor race despite Chapin’s accusation, earning endorsements from the local Democratic Party and the mayor himself.
All along, the whisper network grew and grew. The allegations I heard painted a picture of a man who was, at times, out of control and willing to push boundaries and consent past the breaking point.
Which is why it was not just astonishing, but humiliating, that Lurie decided to stick by Yekutiel and endorse him after Chapin’s allegations came out instead of staying out of the race altogether.
Lurie is now a living metaphor for how badly the political system in the city can fail to protect victims and create accountability for perpetrators.
The mayor pulled his endorsement of Yekutiel on Thursday, and it reads less like a mea culpa and more like a dog with its tail between its legs, slinking away with no eye contact. Much has been written about Lurie leading a moderate bloc in the Board of Supervisors and in the SF Democratic County Central Committee (DCCC). If he thought that standing behind Yekutiel after Chapin’s allegation arose was a way to maintain a strong front, he was wrong. The decision wasn’t just morally repugnant; it indicated that Lurie is still, despite a 70 percent approval rating, a political neophyte.
The Beya Alcaraz disaster was one thing, but the mayor’s endorsement of Yekutiel, and today’s reversal, is a tactical blunder so bad that I question the capabilities of Lurie’s consultant team. If Lurie loves Yekutiel so much, he could’ve back-channeled to give the latter support while maintaining distance in public. I’m stunned by the sheer naivete of what actually happened considering that the director of the mayor’s own Office of Victim Rights, Ivy Lee, already found Chapin’s accusation to be credible long before Lurie decided to publicly back Yekutiel.
In politics, a close ally can also become your biggest vulnerability — and so it is with Lurie, whose tenure is now stained by one of the ugliest spills in recent San Francisco politics.
I wondered, too, how much of these missteps were due to naivete versus its cousin, arrogance. In July, I was shocked when Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman told me over the phone that he was 100 percent behind Yekutiel, and “in no way” believed Chapin’s accusation. They are close friends and political partners, but I was surprised then by the confidence and callousness of framing a potential victim as a straight-up liar. Fast forward to today, and Mandelman has rescinded his endorsement of Yekutiel, claiming it is only now “painfully clear to me he has work to do.”
It beggars belief to think that Mandelman, of all people, wasn’t aware of the whisper network; the brief conversation in July left me wondering about entitlement and how it props up rape culture within our most powerful institutions. Mandelman has maintained that “sexual assault occurs differently” among gay men; Supervisor Myrna Melgar, however, told the Standard that he went as far as to say “For women, this is a big deal. Among the gays, it’s not a thing.” (Mandelman denied he told her that.)
Two things can be true: The act of giving consent can look differently depending on the people and the circumstance, but people can and are non-consensually assaulted in those same contexts. The initial dismissal by Mandelman and others of Chapin’s allegation mirrors exactly what’s been fueling rape culture in America all along: The minimizing of a victim’s trauma through claims that, frankly, they should’ve known it could happen.
It is no surprise that people in power, including the members of the DCCC who voted to endorse Yekutiel back in August, feel comfortable manipulating reality for their own agenda. The party’s Special Committee on Harassment was allegedly designed to carefully hear out potential victims and find solutions to prevent sexual misconduct. In Chapin’s case, the DCCC ignored his report until the Standard broke the news, convinced him that it could adjudicate his allegation, and then revealed that it in fact had no jurisdiction over the incident. It was, Chapin told me, a deeply frustrating process that wasted his time and left him re-traumatized.
It’s a good thing that the DCCC is holding an emergency meeting on Oct. 11 to reconsider its endorsement and hear out the public (again). It’s also a pathetic retreat from a political crisis that, as with Lurie, was largely preventable if members of the DCCC had recognized the complexity of the moment and chosen to stay neutral. Instead of following through on its vision of creating systems to aid victims, the city’s Democratic Party leaders stuck itself in a blind spot so large they might as well have not had eyes in the first place.
Yekutiel’s endorsements disappeared into thin air, which I suspected started happening yesterday when his “supporters” page on his campaign site was taken down. His District 8 opponents Gary McCoy, Darshini Patel, and Michael Nguyen formed an alliance and vowed to not appear next to Yekutiel at any event. State Sen. Scott Wiener took to X this afternoon to call on Yekutiel to suspend his campaign. Once a frontrunner in the D8 race, Yekutiel can now look forward to radio silence from his once-allies and the possibility of weeks of protests at his cafe, led by queer activists who smell blood in the water.
Yekutiel will still have allies, of course, even if they don’t want to declare it anymore. Last night, I attended a City Arts event where billionaire tech magnate/centrist political funder/Standard owner Michael Moritz was interviewed by Yekutiel. For 45 minutes, they fawned over each other with compliments, especially Yekutiel, who venerated Moritz by calling him a “great man,” admiring his billions in capital, and generally falling all over himself to be nice.
It was the picture of a small man kneeling at the feet of political power and wealth, praying that his connections can and will make him untouchable.
Today proved it didn’t work.
